As I have done each and every year in the summer, I will be taking my annual break from technology. Through the month of August, I'll be decreasing my postings and management of this site in hopes of using the time to broaden my perspective. I need to spend some time recharging my batteries and my enthusiasm for content management systems as well as information technology in general.
For the blogger, the most difficult day of the year has to be April Fools' Day. This is the day where jokes are played and stories are made up. Computer geeks and CMS junkies easily get into the spirit of this celebrated day by pulling all kinds of online pranks. One of my fondest April Fools memories is from 2007 when the official Japanese and Russian Drupal sites migrated for a day from the Drupal CMS over to Joomla!. Good times, good times. The folks over at ocProducts have gotten into the 2011 April Fools spirit by announcing ocPortal 7 with HTML6.
I need your help! Please help me keep track of all the CMS related April Fools' stories that you find online. Please feel free to add to my list by of content management pranks via a comment below or through Twitter. If you prefer to tweet the story instead I suggest we start using the Twitter hashtag: #aprilfoolscms.
List of Fake Content Management Stories on April Fools Day 2011
From WordCamp Portland 2010, Melissa Lion & Julie Yamamoto session how how to evolve your career from blogger to professional marketer. I'm always fascinated when I hear people's professional career evolved over time, especially when it is a career that is immersed in information technology, the social web, and Enterprise 2.0.
For a long time I’ve been really interested in performance aspects of content management systems and smarter blogging systems. This is the reason for my decision to test some of the popular systems on a workbench and to get some technical information about these systems.
The test was quite simple. I installed the packages on my sandbox server and added a function (cip-bench()) to the installation. Then I ran the index page with the default template and configuration. The data I got from the test was limited on the raw index page after the installation. I picked up 5 aspects for the test:
It is interesting to see how different some CMS solve their tasks. I was surprised of some results for example 399 database queries of contenido.
To sum up this test I was impressed by chyrp. It’s delivered with an elegant backend and I think it has got a lot of potential to become more popular and famous. The memory usage of wordpress seems to be improved in contrast to previous versions.
| name | memory | avg time | queries | tables | required files |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| chyrp | 5.556 MB | 0.3 – 0.5 | 7-10 | 8 | 63 |
| geeklog | 6.97 MB | 0.6 – 0.7 | 59 | 50 | 38 |
| serendipity | 6.773 MB | 0.5 – 0.55 | 11 | 21 | 48 |
| textpattern | 2.823 MB | 0.2 – 0.3 | 21 | 17 | 12 |
| wordpress | 12.044 MB | 0.4 – 0.6 | 15 | 11 | 73 |
| name | memory | avg time | queries | tables | required files |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| cmsmadesimple | 7.543 MB | 1.1 – 1.48 | 38 – 52 | 52 | 92 |
| contenido | 9.562 MB | 0.6 – 0.9 | 254 – 265 (399) | 76 | 123 |
| impressCMS | 10.938 MB | 0.5 – 0.6 | 53-55 | 57 | 139 |
| joomla | 6.289 MB | 0.7 – 0.8 | 7 – 11 | 33 | 127 |
The folks over at Geeklog have announced that their blogging application now supports PostgreSQL. Geeklog's move is similar to other open source projects that have recently diversified their support for more additional database management systems.
Geeklog, an open source blogging application, just went into its first beta. This release incorporates some of the work done in projects implemented during the 2008 Google Summer of Code.
New features and improvement you can expect in Geeklog 1.6.0 Beta 1 include:
One of the more interesting concepts, I think, is the many ideas for how to incorporate microblogging (think Twitter) into your content management system. Drupal Voices via Lullabot interviews Rob Loach and briefly talks to him about his Distributed Micro-Blogging proposal which received a grant from the Knight Foundation. The audio recording is only two mintues long but there is enough there to get you started thinking how microblogging may eventually play a role in the larger world of content management.
Long time readers should already know that I'm a big fan of Andrew McAfee. Andrew McAfee is the Associate Professor at Harvard Business School that is widely credited for coining the phrase “Enterprise 2.0”. With all the traveling I did in January and February, I haven't had much chance to visit some of my favorite blog sites. To my surprise, Andrew McAfee recently moved his blog from the business school's CMS over to his own domain and his new site looks great!
My local newspaper, the Argus Leader, contains an article about "Twitter fever" finally arriving in Sioux Falls, South Dakota. The start of the article is interesting to read.
Following blogs online takes too much time. So Mike Vetter, 24, uses Twitter to keep up with friends and follow the short posts or "tweets" by people in his business.
"Twitter is called microblogging - small blogs - only up to 140 characters at a time," says Vetter, CEO of DataSync, a Sioux Falls software company. "If I were to follow 50 people blogging, I would be reading all day long. This way I can get the point, boiled down. It's blogging for lazy people."
Isn't that ironic? When blogging first became popular some of the criticisms bloggers heard was that blogs were too short and not polished enough. The thought was that blog posts would never hold the same attention by readers compared to real articles and stories written elsewhere. Now we forward forward to the present and we find that blogs contain too many words which is what spurring the Twitter movement. The length of a tweet is limited by 140 characters (roughly about the same as a text message in a cell phone).
Following this line of thought, I'm now convinced that by the time my five year old son becomes a teenager he'll call Twitter too inefficient. Instead his generation and their even shorter attention span will require you to send messages at 7 characters or less. What would we call this new service, Twit?
After three decades of embracing technology, I think I finally arrived between the old way and the new ways of doing things. My case in point, I found this article in the print version of my Sunday newspaper. At the same time, I'm ready to read what you think of the article via my Twitter account.